Born out
of cataclysm and nurtured in silence and solitude, the music of Tatvamasi reveals
hidden depths of the Polish soul. Tatvamasi is an extraordinary instrumental
ensemble that plays scorching, uncategorizable music defined by searing tenor
sax riffs, cutting electric guitar, and a loose and sinewy rhythm section of
electric bass and drums. With the release of their debut album Parts
of The Entirety, Tatvamasi opens up new territory, bringing the
narrative heft of jazz to the sturdy forms of folk music.
The band traces its origins back to a devastating 2003 car crash that left
their guitarist and composer hospitalized for many months. During his long
recovery, he constructed a vividly detailed, emotionally probing and
spiritually numinous musical world that he christened Tatvamasi.
Brimming with life and incident, and recorded completely live in the
studio, the music here reflects a remarkable journey.
On Saturday, August 30, one of the major figures on the global experimental music scene – French guitarist & electronic musician Richard Pinhas – will perform at Baba Yaga's Hut Presents: Raw Power in London.
Pinhas, known as the "father of electronic music in France," first broke new ground in the 1970s by integrating electronics with rock music; his band Heldon is recognized as one of Industrial Music's precursors. The musician/philosopher (a Ph.d from the Sorbonne, Pinhas has published books on Gilles Deleuze) has remained ceaselessly innovative, releasing dozens of recordings over the years, most of them on Silver Spring-based Cuneiform Records. Most recently, he's been collaborating with Wolf Eyes and masters of Japan's noise scene. Pinhas also took part in a world premiere performance with Merzbow, Keiji Haino and Tatsuya Yoshida at FIMAV 2014 (Festival International de Musique Actuelle), Canada's premiere festival of avant garde music.
This summer, Cuneiform has released two new duo recordings by Richard Pinhas. Welcome In the Void, by Richard Pinhas and Tatsuya Yoshida, is the second chapter in Pinhas' Devolution Trilogy, which began with 2013's Desolation Row, a sonic protest against the rise of neo-liberalism. His release with Oren Ambarchi, called Tikkun, can be seen as a response to (but is not part of) that trilogy. Devoted to healing our wounded world, it is dedicated to 'tikkun,' a concept in Jewish mystical writings from the Kabbalah.
Release Date: 5/27/2014 -Genre: Rock / Electronic / Experimental Music Format: CD+DVD / Digital Download
With Tikkun, Pinhas switches gears from Welcome...In The Void, using his collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi to take on new themes and sonic frontiers. Instead of focusing on the slow degredation of our society and faculties, Tikkun is almost a response to the devolution trilogy, and deals with repairing the world, the mind, and our emotions after they have been so brutally devastated by modernity and technology. The album is named after a main concept in the Ha Ari Kabbalah, ancient Jewish mystical writings, and Tikkun as both concept and music name previously appeared as a track on Pinhas' album Metatron. But this is the first time that Pinhas named an entire album after Tikkun, and he did so "because the concept of TIKKUN is IMMENSE, Very very Big and Important, not only in the original Kabbalah but in all the para-gnosis "jewish" theoretical concepts. It is about the spiritual creation of our world...a kind of parable.. TO REPAIR something deeply Broken is the POINT...and TIKKUN is the concept that this operation or this PROCESS can be named."
Pinhas worked in duo with Oren Ambarchi to bring the album Tikkun to life. Ambarchi, a truly international musician, was born 1969 in an Iraqi Jewish family in Australia. He began his music career in free jazz percussion before focusing on experimental guitar skills, working with to drone band Sunn O))), Burial Chamber Trio, and countless other music collaborations. For Tikkun, Pinhas and Ambarchi worked together in Paris, recording several studio sessions and two live public performances. The result is a double-disc release featuring a CD of studio recordings and a live performance DVD. Mixed in Paris and Australia, it also includes contributions by other longstanding collaborators, including Joe Talia, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Eric Borelva and Pinhas' son, Duncan Pinhas. Tikkun is a staggeringly powerful work, perhaps musically closest to Pinhas' early recordings with his band Heldon. The cover art, designed by French ilustrator Yann Legendre, is also reminiscent of Pinhas' Heldon days. Legendre also designed the cover art for Welcome in the Void, for Desolation Row, and all of Pinhas' recent albums, beginning with Metatron. Pinhas notes that he and Legendre "will work together again...of course! He is very brilliant." Pinhas' collaboration with Ambarchi is also ongoing, and the two look forward to releasing other recordings.
"Yoshida and Oren are great musicians and great men...they are fundamentally IN THE MUSIC." - Richard Pinhas
PROMOTIONAL TRACK //
If you'd like to share music from this release with your readers/listeners, please feel free to use the following track: "Washington, D.C. - T4V1" [excerpt](mp3 download) - stream: @SoundCloud / @Bandcamp / @YouTube
RICHARD PINHAS & YOSHIDA TATSUYA WELCOME IN THE VOID
Release Date: 5/27/2014 -Genre: Rock / Electronic / Experimental Music Format: CD / Digital Download
On Welcome In The Void, Richard Pinhas again pushes sonic and compositional boundaries, this time in a very special collaboration with the legendary Yoshida Tatsuya, "the indisputable master drummer of the Japanese underground." Yoshida is one of the most important musicians of the Japanese experimental music scene for the last 35 years, spearheading at least a half dozen of that country's most important and best known experimental groups, including Ruins, Koenji Hyakkei and Korekyojinn. Teaming up for their first duo recording, Pinhas and Tatsuya push each others' creative limits to make something that even for the experimental master Pinhas, is a new experience: a single, 64-minute, all-instrumental track consisting solely of guitar, percussion and electronics. The spontaneity, intensity, and sheer force of the music created by the duo is a marvel. The Pinhas/Tatsuya collaboration is an ongoing one, and the duo has plans to tour and record more material in Japan in the near future.
Welcome In The Void is the second album in Pinhas' Devolution Trilogy, concerned with mankind's ideological and physical devolution at the hands of our modern socio-politcal world and technology. For the past several years, Pinhas the musician/philosopher has given thought to, in his words, the "Devolution of mankind, civilization, Capitalism's devolution, and mainly devolution of [human/biolgical] faculties related to the rise of machines". He describes Welcome in the Void as "a kind of journey, not more into the being but into the Void - the nothingness that is now the "center" or the absence-of-center of our societies." The first album in Pinhas' Devolution Trilogy was 2013's Desolation Row, a sonic protest against the rise of neoliberalism, the global economic cricis and rising social unrest.
PROMOTIONAL TRACK //
If you'd like to share music from this release with your readers/listeners, please feel free to use the following track: "Part One - Intro"(mp3 download) - stream: @SoundCloud / @Bandcamp / @YouTube
We asked the Micros co-leader, Joel Forrester, “What does the title “Manhattan Moonrise” mean to you?. Here’s what he said:
"The title evokes the moment when nighttime in New York struggles to come to life. The Micros---no matter where we play, let alone where we live, these days---has always been a New York band. We bring The City to our music: this amounts to a form of high lunacy."
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THE MICROSCOPIC SEPTET MANHATTAN MOONRISE
The Microscopic Septet, NYC’s Fave Purveyors of Swing,
Roar Back into the Limelight with Manhattan Moonrise,
an Album of 21st Century Tunes Dedicated to their Beloved Manhattan
Release Date: 5/27/2014 -Genre: Jazz Format: CD / Digital Download
Track Listing
1. When You Get In Over Your Head (3:50)
2. No Time (5:51)
3. Manhattan Moonrise (8:15)
4. Obeying the Chemicals (3:22)
5. A Snapshot Of the Soul (4:13)
6. Star Turn (5:13)
7. Hang It On a Line (5:49)
8. Let's Coolerate One (5:13)
9. Suspended Animation (5:02)
10. Blue (4:14)
11. You Got That Right! (4:57)
12. Occupy Your Life (5:15)
The Microscopic Septet is Phillip Johnston: soprano saxophone Don Davis: alto saxophone Mike Hashim: tenor saxophone Dave Sewelson: baritone saxophone Joel Forrester: piano Dave Hofstra: bass Richard Dworkin: drums
Music lovers and romantics entranced with New York City’s jazz life, take note: The Microscopic Septet are back in the jazz spotlight, disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comment that there are no second acts in American lives. Since roaring back into action in 2006 after a 14-year hiatus, the indefatigably creative ensemble has continued to evolve, burnishing and extending a well-earned reputation as one of the most consistently inventive jazz bands of the 1980s and 2000s/2010s. Reverently irreverent, insistently playful, unfussily virtuosic and unapologetically swinging, the band offers further evidence of its resurgence with Manhattan Moonrise, the Micros’ first project with newly composed originals in 25 years.
With co-founders pianist Joel Forrester and soprano saxophonist Phillip Johnston crafting all the album’s compositions and arrangements the band plays with the loose-limbed precision of a dance orchestra in the midst of a six-month tour. The strength of the Micros flows from the old-school virtue of consistency. Along with the co-founders, the seven-piece ensemble features largely the same cast of improvisers with which it emerged from Manhattan’s wild and wooly Downtown scene in 1980. Drummer Richard Dworkin, baritone saxophonist David Sewelson, bassist David Hofstra, and altoist Don Davis (who replaced John Zorn in 1981) have all been along for almost the entire Microscopic journey, while tenor saxophonist Mike Hashim joined the fold in 2006.
Manhattan Moonrise touches on the band’s entire three and half decade history, with several previously unrecorded tunes from the Micros’ early years, like Forrester’s lushly orchestrated “No Time,” which sounds like a catchy back page from Cedar Walton’s songbook. Johnston’s brief but scorching “Obeying The Chemicals” is another early piece, a deliciously telegraphic booting barrelhouse romp. And then there’s the new work, like Forrester’s episodic Beethoven-inflected closer “Occupy Your Life.”
Whatever the music’s vintage, it shares the unmistakable Micro stamp, a convivial marriage of ingenious craftsmanship and extroverted improvisation. If the band has a patron saint, it’s clearly Thelonious Sphere Monk, whose presence is manifest in the Micros’ cagey humor, harmonic syntax and hurtling rhythms. In much the same way that Monk’s music existed apart from contemporaneous bebop, drawing directly on Ellington and Harlem stride piano while inhabiting its own avant-garde zone, the Micros are avid students of jazz history but unburdened by revivalist notions.
“I've always considered that the Microscopic Septet presents an outward show of being a ‘revival’ outfit,” Forrester says. “But what we attempt to revive...never existed. A revival of the future, then?”
